Pluralistic: Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU (26 Sep 2025)


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The EU flag. Behind the ring of golden stars is a rotten apple. Above the apple is the Apple 'Think different' wordmark. A worm climbs through the 'd' in 'different' and rests on the apple.

Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU (permalink)

Apple has threatened to stop selling iPhones and other devices in the European Union (home to over 500,000,000 affluent consumers) if the bloc doesn't rescind the Digital Markets Act, a democratically accountable anti-monopoly law that bans Apple from blocking third parties from offering services to iPhone owners:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/25/apple-calls-for-changes-to-anti-monopoly-laws-and-says-it-may-stop-shipping-to-the-eu

Apple has a staunch ally in this campaign to overturn European laws: Donald Trump has threatened the EU with tariffs unless it halts its attempts to regulate US tech giants like Apple, whose billionaire CEO Tim Cook gave Donald Trump $1m in exchange for a seat on the dais at Trump's inauguration and then traveled to DC again to hand-assemble a gilded participation trophy as a gift to America's fascist would-be dictator:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/07/tim-cook-trump-gift/85555805007/

This is a painfully stupid threat and the EU should call Apple's bluff. The company claims that it is acting in the interest of European owners of Apple products. Apple claims that by blocking Europeans from using their Apple devices with third-party software and hardware, they are protecting their customers' privacy.

This is nonsense. While it's true that Apple protects its customers' privacy from some external threats, Apple also spies on its users, without their consent, in order to gather behavioral data that's used for Apple's ad-targeting system. When this came to light, Apple lied to its customers about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Apple has used its exclusive control over which software can operate on its devices to expose every Chinese iOS user to unrestricted government surveillance. Apple removed all working VPNs from its Chinese app store:

https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-removes-vpn-apps-from-china-app-store/

The company then backdoored its iCloud backup for unrestricted access by Chinese authorities:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-censorship-data.html

Then they removed the ability to anonymously share messages via Airdrop to curb the tool's usage to spread opposition messages during a wave of mass protests in China (they took away this functionality for every Airdrop user in the world):

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/30/apple-limited-a-crucial-airdrop-function-in-china-just-weeks-before-protests.html

The idea that Apple is so committed to its users' privacy that it will exit a major market rather than expose users to surveillance risks is an obvious lie – just ask China.

Why would Apple tell this lie? Because it wants to protect its profits – not its customers.

Apple lies when it claims that control over its platforms is primarily about protecting users. The App Store is "teeming with scams":

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/apple-e2-80-99s-tightly-controlled-app-store-is-teeming-with-scams/ar-AAKL0TG

However, by forcing Apple customers to get apps from Apple's own store, the company can skim a 30% commission on every dollar its customers send to an app maker, a Patreon performer, a news outlet or any other app supplier – a business that's worth $100b/year to Apple. Remember, in the EU, the cost of processing a payment is between 0% and 1%.

Apple claims that it protects its customers from privacy risks by blocking third-party repair depots and by requiring its customers to pay through the nose for official repair. But Apple's own repair technicians have been caught plundering and sharing nude images of its own customers, stolen from phones that were sent to Apple:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkbkey/she-sent-her-iphone-to-apple-repair-techs-uploaded-her-nudes-to-facebook

This has happened repeatedly:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/12/an-apple-store-employee-helped-customerby-texting-himself-private-photo-her-phone/

All over the world:

https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/12/apple-australia-photo-sharing-ring-nsfw/

(And of course, these are just the instances that we know about).

Apple protects its customers from privacy threats, but not from Apple's own predatory, privacy-invasive, rent-extracting conduct. Apple also gets to unilaterally decide which scams are permitted on its platform and which ones are not, and they alone get to decide when to allow secret, pervasive surveillance of Apple customers.

Apple's threats are lies, but the privacy risks of interop are very real. It's entirely possible to plug something into a secure tool that renders it insecure. It's nice when companies test third party add-ons and warn their customers about defective or risky aftermarket mods, and to the extent that Apple does this, it's doing good work. But Apple has an irreconcilable conflict of interest when it comes to vetoing its customers' decisions about which non-Apple products they use. Apple has some genuinely stonking margins on its payment processing, repair, and other lines of business, and Apple's CEO has openly boasted about using deliberately engineered incompatibilities to drive people to switch to Apple products:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-buy-your-mom-iphone-doj-apple-complaint-2024-3

How do we get Apple to protect its customers' privacy without picking their pockets or invading their privacy? By removing the company's veto over who can make software and hardware that works with Apple's competing offerings. The ultimate decision about which products are too dangerous for Europeans to use can't be vested with Apple – instead, it should be vested with expert agencies working for democratically accountable governments. This is the point that Bennett Ciphers and I made at length in our EFF white-paper "Privacy Without Monopoly," which has a whole section explaining how the EU's big, muscular privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), makes this an especially attractive proposition in the EU:

https://www.eff.org/document/privacy-without-monopoly-data-protection-and-interoperability

It's also a point that EFF board member and infosec legend Bruce Schneier made in his open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, discussing opening up app stores:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-bruce-schneier-senate-judiciary-regarding-app-store-security

Apple isn't going to exit a market with half a billion affluent consumers. If it does, expect its shareholders to wreak swift and terrible vengeance on the company. You know how people are always complaining that investors are only interested in short-term returns? It's true and here's a place where that cuts in our favor: shareholders aren't going to accept a half-billion-person market exit tomorrow in anticipation of forcing the EU to capitulate next year and thereafter safeguard Apple's continental scale rent-extraction racket. They want returns to their capital tomorrow, not in some hypothetical future in which Tim Cook tears out Henna Virkkunen's still-beating heart with his bare hands and parades it through Strasbourg, brandishing it at legions of trembling, vanquished eurocrats.

But let's say Apple does exit the EU.

Good.

The EU needs to get the hell off US tech infrastructure. Under Trump, Big Tech and the US government have stopped even pretending that American tech companies are independent of the US government. We know (from China) that Apple will happily backdoor its cloud servers to assuage authoritarian governments like Xi Xinping's. You know, Xi Xinping, the guy that Trump says he wants to emulate?

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/18/trump-praise-authoritarians-00132350

US Big Tech companies keep demonstrating that they are de facto arms of the US and constitute a hostile foreign power operating on European soil. When the International Criminal Court indicted Israeli génocidaires, Trump issued an executive order sanctioning the body. Immediately thereafter, Microsoft deleted the email and cloud accounts of ICC prosecutor Karim Khan – named in the Trump EO – and then Microsoft President Brad Smith perjured himself in his denial:

https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/

Microsoft publicly admitted that it can't stop US authorities from conducting secret surveillance of EU citizens' (and EU governments') data, even when that data is stored on server in the EU:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

The EU's response is something called "Eurostack" – a top-to-bottom "stack" of technologies from data-centers to operating systems and applications made and maintained by EU entities (for-profits, nonprofits, and public bodies):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Nearly all of the emphasis on Eurostack has been on building the data-centers and creating these applications, but some ways, this is the least important part of the project. Cloning GDocs or Office365 or iWork is the easy part. The hard part is migrating from US-controlled platforms to their Eurostack equivalents. If leaving Office365 means leaving all the documents your company, organization or government agency has ever created, or losing all the sharing and collaboration permissions, or losing all the edit-histories, well, no one is gonna migrate.

Thankfully, this is something technology can easily fix: all you need to do is reverse-engineer the US offering and create a tool that extracts and transforms the data to the new format, and moves a copy of it into the new Eurostack services. This is called "adversarial interoperability" and is eminently do-able, as Apple proved when they broke open Microsoft Office by creating the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

The major impediment to this kind of seamless bulk migration tool isn't the technological challenge – it's the law. In 2001, the EU – under pressure from the USA – included an "anticircumvention" rule in the EU Copyright Directive (EUCD). Article 6 of the EUCD mirrors the language of Section 1201 of America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, banning reverse-engineering and adversarial interoperability, even where no copyright infringement takes place. That means that a European company that made an account migration tool to help European companies or government agencies move their own data out of a US Big Tech silo could face liability under Article 6 of the EUCD, with severe criminal and civil penalties. EUCD 6 gives American tech giants more rights to Europeans' copyrighted works than the Europeans who created those works. It's a terrible law, and after a quarter century, it's long past its expiry date.

Bringing this full circle: Article 6 of the EUCD is also the law that stops European companies from reverse-engineering the iPhone and creating their own app stores, without having to rely on Apple's help. Given that Apple has flagrantly violated laws that order it to open its app store, it's time to unleash Europe's accomplished legion of top technologists on the problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/06/spoil-the-bunch/#dma

Doing that becomes even easier if Apple exits the EU and abandons EU customers, cutting off their supply of security patches and application updates. After all, Europeans own their Apple devices. It's up to them – not Apple – whether they want to trust their fellow Europeans to protect their security and add new functionality of their own property.

The EU doesn't need to be a technology-taker – it can be a technology maker. The Apple/Google duopoly may have sewn up the mobile market with illegal monopoly tactics, but that doesn't mean that the EU will never spawn another Nokia or Ericsson. The shortest, most efficient, most reliable path to reestablishing technological sovereignty for the EU's half-billion residents and 27 member-states is to allow domestic firms to take over the relationship between the Trump-controlled American tech giants and the Europeans who rely on their technology.

If Trump can seize Chinese companies like Tiktok and sell them to his major donors at a 90% discount, then American companies have no right to cry foul when the EU gets rid of the America First Copyright Directive and lets Europeans choose to get their software, updates, and hardware from European companies.

(Image: Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil from Brazil, CC BY 2.0; Hubertl, CC BY-SA 4.0; modified)

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